


the constant (is in you)

by doomedship



Category: The Good Doctor (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23411026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomedship/pseuds/doomedship
Summary: Five different days in hospital, ft Melendaire.
Relationships: Claire Browne/Neil Melendez
Comments: 42
Kudos: 182





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a while back and sat on it, so it harks back to happier times. I hope it does at least some people some good.
> 
> Two more days to be finalised when I feel less bleak maybe.

i.

It's four-fifteen and she hasn't eaten since breakfast, which she got halfway through in the cafeteria before being abruptly called to the ER by a scowling Morgan.

The hospital is manic, suffering from a sudden influx of vexatious patients, ones who take up precious time from all the residents and who really shouldn't be in the ER.

She's almost weak with hunger when she finally gets done with rounds and she's flopping into a chair in the rec room. She puts the heels of her hands to her forehead and she lets out an audible groan, thinking there's nobody there to hear her. 

But a quiet laugh makes her sit upright in alarm, and then she's blinking up at him, arms folded as he watches her. 

"How long have you been standing there?" she demands. And he rolls his eyes at her. 

"You walked right past me," he says. 

"Oh," she says, flopping back again. Her stomach growls audibly, and he cocks an eyebrow. "What? You try eating around someone's open appendectomy," she says mutinously. 

The corner of his mouth lifts in that annoyingly appealing way of his and he produces a paper bag from behind his back, dangling it on one finger. Her eyebrows shoot up.

She groans in near ecstasy when he sits opposite her and hands her a paper wrapped sandwich from the sub shop she likes, and even more so when she realises he's got her order just the way she likes it. 

Who knew brie could taste _that_ good. 

"This is the best sandwich I've ever eaten," she informs him with her mouth full after she's taken her first enormous bite. He looks at her with amusement and affection dancing in his eyes as he sits opposite her. 

"You back in the OR this afternoon?" he asks. She nods slowly, swallowing a large chunk of sandwich. 

"Yup," she says thickly. "Got a hand repair with Andrews."

"Oh," he says, frowning. "That's going to be a long day."

"Yeah," she says. "Wanna get dinner after? I can't bear to run today."

He tilts his head, that familiar look that says something meaningful he'll never say out loud on his face, and she smiles knowingly back.

"Yeah," he says. "Meet me in the parking lot when you're done with that guy's hand."

She grins, then groans as her pager goes off, and she shoots him an exasperated look as she inhales the last of her sandwich and gets to her feet again.

"It's a date," she promises. 

He smiles to himself and wonders if that's what this is.

...  
ii.

It's five forty one in the morning and Claire's dead on her feet. She's worked for eighteen hours straight and she doesn't even know which way is up anymore. 

It's too late to go home, or too early maybe, she's not sure which. Her temples are throbbing. All she knows is that if her head doesn't hit a pillow soon she's going to fall over where she stands. 

She's paused for a second, just a second, leaning her head on the wall in their office and shutting her eyes, which is a mistake because she doesn't feel like ever opening them again. Her mind starts drifting even as she stands, and she wonders if it's possible to actually fall asleep upright with her head on the wall.

She's jolted when she feels a gentle hand land on each of her shoulders, and she turns her head to see his amused expression, almost as tired as hers but still warm and sympathetic looking down at her. 

She's not really sure why he's here too at this hour, can only assume he's had a patient to keep alive as well. Such is their lives.

"What are you in for?" she says, and she's dimly aware that she sounds fuzzy with tiredness.

"Emergency surgery," he says, gently guiding her away from the wall.

"How'd it go?"

"He died."

That gets her attention. She stands up straight again and turns, facing him properly.

"Sorry," she says. She knows by now that he's as strong as an oak tree on the outside but he hurts just the same as she does each time he loses somebody.

He shrugs, and she sees her bone weariness mirrored in his face. 

She can't resist putting her arms around him then, her hands sliding around his middle and her head finding the crook of his neck without hesitation. It's a perfect fit and she knows he doesn't mind because his arms go up over her shoulders without missing a beat and one hand slowly makes its way up to the nape of her neck to tangle in her hair.

And it's comfortable and warm and safe, the heady scent of him engulfing her, and her eyes start to close again standing right there in his arms.

He glances down at her and his chest vibrates when he laughs softly. 

"Let's get you some sleep."

He draws back and steers her through the door despite her grumbling, and walks her into the nearest unoccupied on call room, where he takes her bag from her and nudges her towards the narrow single bed. She kicks her shoes off and falls gratefully onto the mattress flat on her face, before turning her head and cracking one eye open to look at him.

"Sleep now," he says, crouching by the side of the bed next to her head. "Then go home. I swapped your shift so you're not due back til Thursday."

She gives an incoherent sigh of endless gratitude, moving a hand in his general direction, and he smiles, turning to leave. 

"Hey. You should sleep too," she mumbles, rolling and rubbing her eyes. "Can't drive home this late. Early. Whatever."

"I'll be okay," he says, and she props herself up on an elbow to throw a disapproving frown at him. The corner of his mouth quirks and he rolls his eyes before he kicks off his shoes and undoes his top buttons. 

"Fine," he says, and he falls back heavily on the second bunk next to her, bouncing a little as she laughs quietly at him. "Just a couple hours."

He lays back and puts his hands behind his head as she turns onto her side so she can look at him for the ten seconds she has before her eyes are too heavy to keep open and she's sound asleep, one hand gently pillowed under her cheek.

He lasts a little longer, tilting his head a while to watch her breathing grow slow and steady, and he smiles before he's out like a light too. 

He's already gone by the time she wakes up just as the hospital is coming back to life, but not before he's tucked a blanket over her, and brushed the hair out of her face in a way that just might have turned into a caress before he slips out of the room as quietly as he can.

As much as he wants to stay, he knows how it'll look, and he wants to spare her the scrutiny of anyone finding them together.

And frankly if he's ever going to wake up with her in the morning, it had damn well better be in the same bed. 

...

iii.

Claire loses a patient. 

It's twenty seven days since the last time she failed somebody on the table and it shouldn't be a shock anymore, not when she's a surgeon and they walk a knife edge between life and death every single day. 

And worse is, the dead girl was Neil's patient too, and she feels like she's let him down as well. 

If only she'd spotted the bleed sooner.

He finds her with her head in her hands in the locker room, always able to find her like a homing beacon lighting up the night. He always knows the places she hides. 

He crouches on the floor in front of her, and all their boundaries are already broken down. They're just one person now, two hearts, one beat, the same old taste of grief. 

He puts his hands gently to her wrists and pulls her hands down from her face, and she looks at him with smudgy red eyes and a searching gaze, looking for an answer maybe he can't give, but it doesn't matter anyway. 

It doesn't really matter what the answer is, because all she's looking for is him.

She all but falls into him then, her arms winding tight around his neck, and he raises her up and holds her close, one hand tangling in her hair as the other presses her to his chest so she can hear the safety rhythm of his heart beating steadily against her.

Not dead, she thinks. So alive. 

On nights like these that reek of death and loss, that's all she has to cling to. 

And it seems to make sense, somehow, when she leans back and looks at him, so soft and understanding, to just tilt her chin and lean right in, no more thinking about what might go wrong. 

Their mortal coil is short, after all.

He is still for a moment, delicately so, his lips warm against hers. She wonders briefly if she's made a mistake, if inner turmoil after the death of a patient is a bad time to sort through their years old unacknowledged love affair, and to give into what they've both been wanting but denying for so long.

But just as she is about to retreat, his mouth opens to hers, hesitant and soft at first, but he's been keeping such a tight rein on himself for so long and his resistance is worn thin. It only takes a flick of her tongue against his lips before he's moving against her with urgency and desire, his hands pulling her close and his lips fierce against hers. 

And maybe it's a little wrong, them starting out like this, in a darkened room with the ghost of their dead patient hanging over their heads and no idea if there's any way to cross this river that lands them on the other side. 

She thinks maybe she should take a step back, recalibrate, find a different way ahead.

But standing there with him wrapped around her, she finds more of a compass point in him than she does in anything else in the world and it's comforting, a safe harbour in all this storm. When he finally draws back and presses his forehead against hers, she meets his eye and smiles, bravely, a step towards the light. 

She spends the night with him that night, just to sleep, nothing else, only the comfort of his warm body tucked behind hers and waking up to his arm over her belly and his lips against her shoulder.

When she turns to face him in the light of a new morning, she knows that this is the only way they could ever have ended up.

It's a moment that feels like absolution, even if they don't believe. 

It's a moment that feels right, when everything else is wrong.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Parts 4 and 5 as promised - with a lighter tone, bordering on the saccharine, but in these times, fight me.

iv.

...

They don't have a patient so they're all on scut work. Even Neil, whose scheduled heart bypass is cancelled when his patient suddenly stops breathing with a signed DNR freshly inked the day before. 

"I did too many years of training to be patching up scraped knees all day," he grumbles, and there's a round of agreement from his unhappy team of Claire and Morgan before they lapse into uneasy silence.

They're all frustrated, and even Claire's got no patience with anybody today. Morgan starts needling her, probably just for fun, but Claire's too irritated and sick of Morgan's sniping to turn the other cheek. Morgan says something careless about her mother and Claire snaps back, but she knows she's cutting close to the bone when she brings up Caroline Reznick.

Neil shoots her a look of speculative concern as Morgan storms out icily, leaving Claire on her own with him in the dim break room.

Claire sighs heavily and bites her lip, the guilt rising like a wave. 

"You okay?" he asks, coming to stand next to her where she's aggressively washing out a mug at the sink. 

"Yeah," she says, turning to face him as she dries her hands. He raises an eyebrow and she shrugs. "I guess we're all on edge. We haven't had an interesting surgery for days and there's not long left before jobs are announced."

He gives her a long look. "Maybe you need to let off some steam," he says, and she looks at him curiously. There's an undercurrent of something, something charged and suggestive, in what he says, but he has never started anything at work before in all these months and she can't imagine he means to start now. 

Even if it is the world's most uneventful shift at St Bonaventure.

But he looks at her appraisingly, then casts a glance over his shoulder. He moves across the room quickly and turns the lock on the door, which makes Claire's eyebrows shoot up.

"What are you-" she says, but he's already back by her side, and his hands find her hips firmly as he presses his pelvis up against hers without a moment's hesitation. 

"We won't have long," he mutters against her mouth, before he catches her surprised exhale in a deep and forceful kiss, and her pulse is already racing because she can feel him firm against her belly and his hands are roaming fast, finding skin, and she gasps aloud when his hand slides under the waistband of her scrubs and presses just right underneath.

He always knows exactly how to touch her to make her go from nought to sixty in moments. He's a surgeon, and precision runs through his veins.

She's playing catch-up with him at first but she soon makes good ground, her hands sliding under his shirt and her tongue deft against his. Then all of a sudden she finds herself lifted up onto the table where he has one arm tight around her waist, pulling her body against his, and the other hand is busy underneath her scrubs, determined to make her come apart before somebody tries to walk in. 

In return she's scrabbling with his shirt buttons, undoing a few before giving up and turning to his fly, pushing his suit pants down just enough to free him from his boxers, earning her a grunt of approval as her hands roam, relishing in the illicit pleasure of this stolen moment. He's never usually demonstrative at all at work and the unexpected intensity of him doing this now makes her ache desperately for him.

As if he knows this, he's tugging her bottoms down and sliding her to the edge of the table, when sudden footsteps in the corridor make them stop and pause, their eyes locked as they wait tensely. She feels her blood pounding through her, exhilarating and definitely, definitely not boring, and then thank god, the footsteps fade away and he's dropping his lips to her neck as he lines himself up and she gasps out as he enters her in one hard stroke, her legs automatically winding around him and pinning him in place. 

They know they don't have long so it's a race to get where they need to be and his motions are fast and urgent, driving into her with hands gripping tightly to her hips. He's patient, holding back as she arches and gives a stuttered moan, clinging to him and groaning as he reaches down to touch her in *just the right place to send her reeling. 

Her final cry is licence for him to follow her in reckless abandon, his low groan sweet in her ears as he surges forward hard and catches himself on one unsteady arm, pressing her back into the table as he kisses her parted lips and grips her hip. 

"Better?" he says a few moments later, breathing hard, and she stretches languidly under him, legs still crossed over his back.

"Just a bit," she says, and lets him ease himself off her reluctantly. "Not sure I can ever sit at this table again though."

He laughs, and helps her clean up and get back into her scrubs, and even manages to unlock the door safely before Morgan barges in demanding an apology, probably also wondering why Claire is hastily scrubbing down the tabletop with disinfect.

He just winks at her from behind Morgan's back as he slips out the door, and she suddenly finds she has a lot more patience for scut work.

  
v.

...

"I need you to get him here," she chokes out, glaring at Park over the edge of her hospital bed. She feels the sweat trickling down her forehead, and she clutches the rail.

"I know, I'm sorry, Claire," Park says to her. Shaun's on the other side, and he pats her forearm gingerly with the edge of his hand.

"Dr Melendez has several hours to go in an aortic dissection," Shaun says, helpfully, but it makes Claire drop her head back to the pillow in despair and Shaun jumps at the low moan she gives when she's suddenly wracked by pain. 

It's been hours since her waters broke and her contractions are coming closer and closer together. 

The clock ticks to eleven. 

He got called into the emergency surgery almost eight hours ago and unexpected complexity has kept him trapped in the OR. 

She's thirty-eight weeks exactly and they were hoping for a little more time, or he wouldn't have gone, but it's just typical that the baby's coming on the one night she was curled up alone in their bed. 

He's been rostered off nights for the last two weeks, just in case, but tonight Andrews is at a medical conference and Lim's handling a trauma patient, and he was last man standing. 

"I'll get it done and be back before you're asleep," he promised her in the afternoon, kissing her cheek and running his hand over the prominent swell of her belly. She had a bad feeling about letting him go, but somebody's life hung in the balance and it had to be done. 

That feels a lifetime ago. 

She had to call Morgan to drive her to St Bonaventure, and she's glad she did. Morgan's got a military-like efficiency and mysteriously comes complete with a birthing bag full of things Claire hasn't even prepared herself yet. 

But she could do with Neil holding her hand instead of Morgan barking at her to breathe. 

He still doesn't even know that she's in labour; everybody agreed it would only throw him off the surgery and it's not like he could leave, so she tells Park, Morgan and Shaun to just keep an eye on the procedure from the gallery and tell him the second he comes out. 

"Claire, you're almost at ten centimetres," the midwife says gently. "It's not going to be long now."

"No," she groans, pressing her hand to her forehead. "He needs to be here."

Morgan comes sweeping into the room, and Claire looks up at her desperately as she pants through a contraction. 

"He's got a way to go still," Morgan says grimly. "I'm sorry."

Park gets to his feet to take the next shift in the gallery, and Morgan sits down.

The midwife smiles kindly. "It's time to prep you for the next stage of labour. Don't worry about a thing."

She sighs and lies back wearily, wondering if she can keep her cervix from dilating further by sheer willpower. 

"Do you want us to come with you?" Morgan asks, and Shaun looks alarmed. 

"I don't want to be there," he informs her, and despite herself Claire laughs. 

"That's okay, Shaun, I don't really want you there either. Morgan, you're in," she says. 

"Don't worry. I'm better looking than Melendez anyway," Morgan says, and squeezes her hand. Claire squeezes back gratefully as she's wheeled through to the delivery room. 

And a couple hours later, she's screaming and pushing through the worst pain she's ever experienced. She's taken every drug on offer and it's still the absolute worst agony, and she's crushing Morgan's hand and screaming incoherently at her the whole time.

Even Morgan starts to look a little afraid.

"... I'm the father, I should be in there already, just get out of my way- yes, obviously they're sterile. I'm a goddamn surgeon."

Claire's eyes fly to the door, and a very, very agitated Neil Melendez stares back at her through it. 

"Claire," he says, pushing past the obstructive midwife and making a beeline for her side. He's in a fresh surgical gown, the fastest way of getting him from an OR to her delivery room, and he looks almost as exhausted as she feels.

"You... look... terrible," she pants, observing his tired eyes and heavily furrowed brow, and finally, thank God, his hand is tightly wrapped around hers.

"Yeah, so do you," he says with a shaky puff of laughter, dropping a kiss to her forehead. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay. You didn't miss the good part," she says, and groans as she prepares for another push. He presses his lips to her knuckles and the midwife urges her on, and Claire heaves. 

And again. And again. 

And eventually, at two in the morning, their newborn son is placed in her arms.

"Congratulations," the midwife says, and Claire can't quite stop crying, and Neil's got tears in his eyes too and Morgan's beaming as she bounces out to tell the others. 

And it's the best night in this hospital Claire's ever had


End file.
